


Cursebreaker

by flitterflutterfly



Category: Die Hard (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 23:10:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flitterflutterfly/pseuds/flitterflutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the rubble of Diagon Alley, Auror John McClane finds a kid named Matt shivering over the dead body of the Dark Lord.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cursebreaker

**Author's Note:**

> For the sexy_right challenge where I had to include these words: chandelier, tattoo, walk, wizard, candy.

Matt fell asleep in the spell-warmed water of his first bath at John’s spacious flat. Luckily John had put an warning charm on it, expecting something like that to happen but still unwilling to stay and watch the traumatized kid wash himself. He’d thought Matt deserved privacy after all he’d been through.

Still, when John rushed in and waved his wand, dissipating the water in the tub so that he could pick Matt’s frail body up and carry him to John’s guest bedroom, well Matt’s face had shifted his face into John’s robes and John’s heart had skipped a beat.

After that, Matt never bathed alone unless he specifically asked for it.

-~-~-~-

John McClane graduated from Hogwarts in 1974, four years before Matthew Farrell was born to muggle parents in one of London’s poorer districts. John finished Auror training while Matt was still in diapers and had been promoted to a Chief Auror by the time Matt first got his letter to Hogwarts.

In the muggle world, twenty one years between lovers would be scandalous. The wizarding world barely batted their eye at the age difference, focusing instead on the obvious. On that scar that was burned into Matt’s back like so many who now rested in Azkaban.

The memory of wizards were short despite their longer lifespans, John would tell himself. Once, the magical world revered Matt as a hero for relinquishing them of the dark lord’s rule. When Matt refused to go out and bask in his own status and instead stayed holed up in John’s flat… well the attitude turned from disappointment to snobbery to slighted anger.

Sometimes, John thought he would have preferred the muggle sneers at their gender and their ages to the wizard sneers at their pasts. Muggles could groan and moan; wizards could try to take Matt away and that was unacceptable.

-~-~-~-

There was a small chandelier that hung over John’s dining room table. He saw Matt staring at it one night at dinner.

“What’s up?” John asked.

“It’s just,” Matt looked down. “He-”

John moved, resting a hand softly on the back of Matt’s neck. He had been surprised, early on, to find that physical contact comforted Matt. He’d worked with enough victims in his job to have tried to keep his distance, but instead Matt leaned into him like he was starving for touch.

“He liked to hang people there,” Matt murmured, “from his chandelier, as an example.”

John’s hand tightened and he pulled Matt into his chest.

The next day, the chandelier was gone.

-~-~-~-

Matt was in his final year at Hogwarts with the Dark Lord Thomas Gabriel first made himself known to the wizarding public.

Later, after that first meeting in the rubble of Diagon Alley, John would wonder how no one knew that Matt had been taken into the Dark Lord’s circle. He supposed they’d thought the kid had gone back to the muggle world, Matt wouldn’t have been the first to walk away, especially not in the years where Gabriel was large.

The fact that no one had heard from Matt in years hadn’t seemed to make a difference. Maybe if people had been asking around, the Auror’s would have caught their break sooner.

As it was, no one asked, no one knew. No one was there when Matt was forced to do what he did.

The thought still enrages John, even months after he’d first found the kid, while he is curled around a body shaking on the bed, wrecked with nightmares that may never go away. It’s all he can do not to curse into sweat-damp hair, so instead he wraps his arms around a waist still too thin and pull himself closer, giving comfort where he could.

-~-~-~-

Of his whole set of family and friends, it was Holly who supported Matt immediately. John will later learn that Matt had been the one whom she’d gone to during Jack's girlfriend’s pregnancy—when one of the many crooks John had put away decided to take some revenge and cast a nasty spell on the poor girl.

“He’s one of the best at what he does,” Holly told John. “He’s a sweet kid who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was taken advantage of.”

John gaped at her. “He saved your life.” For Holly had cast a lifebonding spell on the baby that would be their first grandchild and it had almost killed her too.

“And Jack’s wife and son,” Holly said. “If I can repay my life debt to him by letting him know that he’s a hero, that nothing that happened while the _fucking_ dark lord was alive was his fault, then I’ll continue to do that.”

“Good,” John said slowly, still stunned that his ex-wife had just cussed.

“And John,” Holly called. “If you ever hurt him, our divorce hearing will seem like a picnic compared to what I will do to you.”

John couldn’t help the smile that stretched over his face. “I won’t,” he promised her. “I never will.”

 -~-~-~-

“He found me as I was walking home,” Matt told John the day after.

The Daily Prophet lay on the table in front of them with a picture of a different Matt, a healthy smiling Matt, next to another picture of Thomas Gabriel’s dead body on the front page.

“Why did he want you?” John asked, because he still couldn’t figure that out, despite having spent the entire night alternating between taking care of the kid and looking up all of the records of him he could find.

“Cursebreaking,” Matt said. “I’m a cursebreaker.”

John stifled his initial disbelief, because if Matt had stayed alive through years in the dark lord’s care then he had to be telling the truth. Cursebreaking was one of the hardest forms of magic; cursebreakers actually had to see the threads of the spell to manipulate them into something different.

And despite its name, cursebreakers didn’t always  _break_  what they were working on. John remembered the scare at the Ministry just around the year before when the wards on floo travel had been tampered with, blocking people in green fire, colliding bodies into each other.

Yet, despite the very real possibility that it had been this kid who’d caused that, John couldn’t feel anything but sadness. “The hospitals are always hiring cursebreakers, you know.”

Matt looked down at his own moving picture and the caption under it that proclaimed him a hero. “Maybe,” he said.

-~-~-~-

John was just another Auror that swarmed Diagon Alley that day in the aftermath of the explosion that rocked shop and shopper alike.

He still gets nightmares about the possibility of someone else having found Matt first. But there wasn’t another. John was the only one who’s ears picked up the soft sobbing, or at least the only one who detoured down the border to Knockturn Alley and ducked behind a section of cobbled street turned vertical.

John was the one who took Matt home.

-~-~-~-

“What changed?” John asked, after. “What made you finally fight back?”

Matt looked down. “He wanted to mark me, to prove my loyalty to him.”

“He believed you were loyal?” John wondered aloud.

“I don’t know,” Matt whispered.

“Oh.”

There was silence.

“So, not a tattoo person?” The joke fell flat between them and John’s memory flash to him the fresh tattoo, the fresh scar, nestled like a leech between Matt’s shoulder blades.

Matt’s gaze met his from behind dark eyelashes. “No.”

-~-~-~-

“Merlin’s balls!” John swore, the first thing he ever said to Matt. “That’s Thomas Gabriel.”

The figure shivering over the body jerked back at the sound of his voice. His dark, frightened eyes raised to look at John and the auror’s breath hitched.

He was young, barely out of Hogwarts, John thought. And yet, there he was, robes wrecked beyond repair as he curled around himself, the still body of the greatest Dark Lord in modern history sprawled at his feet.

-~-~-~-

Matt grabbed at the chocolate frog like it was water for his dehydration. There was a magical quality to chocolate, something that healed trauma. It was because of this that John had rifled through his cupboards to find the frog leftover from the last time Lucy visited him.

Still, John frowned as he watched the kid devour it reverently. “Bet you loved Halloween Feast, huh?”

“Hmm?” Matt asked with a mouthful of brown goon.

John rolled his eyes. “All the candy, seems like you have a bit of a sweet-tooth.”

Matt blushed as he set down the other half of the frog, “Did you want some?”

“No,” John laughed. “No, go ahead.”

-~-~-~-

“How was St. Mungo’s?” John asked as Matt got home.

Matt shrugged. “The usual.”

John wasn’t fooled. “Matt,” he murmured, holding out his arms. Matt folded into them quickly. “What happened?”

“Sometimes I don’t think it’ll ever be enough,” Matt confessed finally. “That I’ll never save enough lives to make up for the ones I ruined.”

“Bullshit,” John said. “Who got you back to this tripe again?”

“John…” Matt whined.

“No,” John said. “You only get like this when someone spouts some bloody lies about how you  _wanted_  to work for Gabriel. You know better, Matt.”

Matt buried his face into John’s shoulder. “Are you sure you're not the cursebreaker?” he asked, only slightly teasing.

“What?” John frowned.

Matt laughed and lifted his head again. “Did I ever say thanks?”

“You never needed to,” John said with a rough voice. “Whatever happened, whatever will happen, you’re here.”

“You’re all I need,” Matt agreed like an echo of John’s thoughts.

-~-~-~-

The first time Lucy saw Matt, she turned on John with her hands on her hips, looking so much like her mother that John prepared himself for that inevitable flinch of his heart in his chest.

The flinch never came.

That was the turning point that had John straightening his shoulders and Lucy dropping her arms down to her side.

“Oh,” she said softly. “As long as you're happy.”

John smiled as Matt looked between them, confused. “Thanks, Luce.”

-~-~-~-

One month after John first showed the traumatized kid named Matt to the guest bedroom of his flat, he realized that he never wanted Matt to leave.

When he voiced this to the kid, Matt smiled at him. “Okay.”

“Okay,” John agreed.

And then, because it seemed like the right thing to do, John kissed Matt softly on the forehead. Matt arched against him immediately, whining as John pulled back in surprise. “John,” he said. “Please.”

“Okay,” John said again, and when he went in for a kiss this time, it landed on lips.

-~-~-~-

John kneeled down by the shivering figure. “Did you do this, kid?”

The kid hissed out something small and then nodded.

As he sucked in a quick breath, John began to catalogue all he could. From the blood that seemed to center in the torn back of the kid’s robes, the location of most of the marks of the dark lord’s followers, to the ugly sneer on Thomas Gabriel’s dead face. “What’s your name?”

“Matt,” the kid answered. “Matthew Farrell.”

A muggle name, John noted. “My name is John McClane and I’m an auror.”

He’ll never know what possessed him to say what he said next. All he knew was that he somehow heard in his own voice, “and I’m going to take care of you, okay Matt?”

Matt looked at him with deep, dark eyes that would soon suck John in and never let him go. “Please,” he said.

So John did.


End file.
